Robotics weekly meetings

Purpose

1. Community. Keep everyone updated as to what other work is going on in the lab
2. Research. Cross germination. Get feedback. Get help on problems. Get ideas.
3. Admin. Lab administration.

Format

1. Presentation & Discussion (30 - 50 mins)
   • Work you have been doing
   • Reading you have been doing in the context of your work
   • Other reading on something you are passionate about
2. Robotics Group Administration (0 - 15 mins)

Try and make your session as involving as possible for everyone:

• Send round material to be read beforehand.
• Ask people before the meeting what aspects of your work / reading they would like to know about or discuss.
• Think about implications of what you are presenting for the research direction of the lab as a whole - methodologies, technologies etc.

Timing & Attendance

The weekly meetings ALWAYS take place on

Wednesdays at 14.30

Unless:

• A given Wednesday is a public holiday, or
• Something very important (like a Ph.D. defense) is overlapping.

If either should happen the meeting is postponed to the next day.

Please indicate on this wiki page if you are not going to be able to attend a meeting (no later than the Friday before).

If you forget to note your absence in advance you will be severely punished and will be forced to buy a nice, big cake for the following meeting.

Previous Meetings

See Minutes and agendas from previous meetings.

Wednesday 14th June 2006 - Alexandre

Agenda

1. Presentation / Discussion
   • The presentation is about foraging. I present a mechanism that aims at selecting the closest resource for a group of robots.
2. Robotics Group Admin

Reading material

People who will be absent

Roderich

Wednesday 21st June 2006 - Rehan

Agenda

1. Presentation / Discussion
   • I will present the likely theme for my Phd: 'Swarm Control'. Research in Swarm robotics is currently focused on producing increasingly sophisticated autonomous behaviour in robotic swarms. However intelligent robot swarms become, humans will still for the forseeable future need some way of controlling these swarms for them to be useful 'tools'. The design of such control mechanisms is not obvious, since in distributed swarm systems there is no natural mapping from human goals to the robots' internal representation of the world.
2. Robotics Group Admin
   • Sbot Common Repository - Rehan

Reading material

People who will be absent

Wednesday 28th June 2006 - Anders

Agenda

1. Presentation / Discussion
   • Fault detection, isolation and tolerance for autonomous robots.
2. Robotics Group Admin
   • Let's discuss Francesco request about new s-bots specifications and prepare a document for him (Marco)

Reading material

People who will be absent

Wednesday 5th July 2006 - Elio

Agenda

1. Presentation / Discussion
   • I will try to present the results of the analysis of the mechanisms employed by the robots to solve the navigation task I described the previous time. My presentation will be very very informal. Please, do not expect too much since I'm particularly busy working on other issues
2. Robotics Group Admin

Reading material

People who will be absent

No more meetings before September!